Biggest Negro Station

Memphis' radio station WDIA can make some rare claims: it finds jobs for unemployed, picks up hospital bills, supports a home for crippled children, hands out scholarships, even locates stray mules for farmers. For its pains, WDIA tops every station in the mid-South in ratings and advertisers. What makes it all the more unusual is that it is a "Negro station"--the biggest and oldest U.S. station beamed at Negro listeners.

Last week, as it celebrated its tenth anniversary, WDIA changed hands for $1,000,000. The thumping price, biggest ever paid for a Negro station, pointed up the findings of a study just released by the Radio Advertising Bureau: "The Negro market can make--or break--the sales programs of even the biggest advertisers. These 17.3 million customers are growing in power and influence . . . faster than the U.S. average." Though Negro stations were unheard-of ten years ago, they prosper today in every sizable city in the South, and in big cities up North.

After a single forlorn year as a white "good-music" station, WDIA began beaming its voice at 1,230,000 Negroes who live within the 50,000-watt range from Cairo, Ill. to Jackson, Miss. It was soon heeded not only in homes and cars but in the fields, where cotton pickers still take portable radios to pick up the disk-jockey ramblings of Theo ("Bless My Bones") Wade and such musical shows as Tan Town Coffee Club, Wheelin' on Beale and Hallelujah Jubilee. Despite the jazzy titles, WDIA favors spirituals over romp-and-stomp music.

The station's strongest pitch is not to the ear but the heart. During its 4 a.m.-to-midnight schedule, it airs hundreds of distress calls, ranging from alarms for lost children to pleas for blood donors. As a tracer of missing persons, it puts radio's fictional Mr. Keen to shame, has a stringer system all over the South to help in tracking them down. Last year WDIA gave baseball uniforms and equipment to 650 boys, is now raising funds for an orphanage.

Like its old owners, WDIA's new buyer, Egmont Sonderling of Oak Park, Ill., is white, and so is its management. With more sponsors than he can crowd into his schedule, even at the rate of one every five minutes, Broadcaster Sonderling plans to keep Memphis' WDIA on the same old lucrative beam.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.